Luis Augusto Franciosi, Aluizio Ancona de Faria, Rodrigo Cambiaghi Azevedo

There are many theories and methodologies that try to define the best way to manage a business and assure its value chain alignment. However, it’s rare to find an approach that takes into account the unconscious aspects that defines the leadership model, the organizational culture and the behavior of the involved people. These factors have an important influence in the decision model of the firm’s executives and in the relationships between suppliers and customers. This article analyses the utilization of a method that aligns the enterprise’s value chain, its leadership and its organizational culture with the customers.

The first step of the proposed method is the customers’ segmentation based on their buying behaviors and values. The traditional approaches of customers’ segmentation consider mainly the elementary customers characteristics, such as the geographic location and the annual customers’ purchase volume. Although useful, they don’t help to understand the attributes of the customers’ buying behavior, such as: their demand variation, the usual urgency they need a product, how much their sales forecast or allocated orders changes, their disposition to establish a partnership, and so on. All these aspects are important for the management of the value chain and for the alignment of the value proposal with its effective delivery. The traditional approach defines only one servicing strategy for all segments (one size fits all), instead of multiple possibilities.

According to John Gattorna [1], successful enterprises are those whose strategy, translated in a value proposal, are aligned with the customers’ buying behavior. This alignment occurs as the leadership style and internal capacities (organizational culture) satisfy, by customer segmentation, their different valued attributes.

The translation of this concept in practical terms implies in the definition of a service package for each identified group. This package includes the service differentiation, the communication alternatives, the level of collaboration and information sharing, the prices, the offered products and its quality, and others.

The innovation proposed by the method consists on the concept that different value chains must be set according to the customer group, serving each one by the way they most value. This article will describe the necessaries steps to put the method in practice.

The implementation of the method proposed provided many important results. The first and crucial one is the executive alignment related to the chain model that must be adopted. The discussion process is very easy, because it is structured in an intuitive form, based on human behavior. It allows a greater participation of each stakeholder and facilitates the understanding of the various organizational functions. Lastly, it helps in the establishment of the impacts in the value delivery and allows the operational settings to be aligned with the value proposal defined in the enterprise’s strategy.